Author: Michael Scott Moore
Publication: Spiegel Online
Date: January 5, 2006
URL: http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,391716,00.html
As the United States tries to spread democracy
throughout the Muslim world, a rare meeting with Islamic radicals in Indonesia
shows the downside of the country's post-Suharto representative politics:
It has allowed fundmentalists to openly thrive in a country where they were
once suppressed. Are there lessons to be learned here for Iraq?
As people shopped for groceries at an open-air
market on New Year's Eve in the Indonesian coastal town of Palu, a homemade
bomb loaded with nails killed at least eight people and ripped apart a kiosk
selling pork. Christians on the island of Sulawesi eat pork on New Year's,
but devout Muslims, of course, don't. Indonesian police believe the bombing
is the latest tragic installment in a long-simmering religious struggle, like
the decapitation of three Christian girls on another part of the island last
October. Militants with machetes attacked the girls in a cocoa plantation
while they walked to a Christian school, and -- just to make sure they made
their point nice and clear -- they left one of the heads lying outside a church.
The message was war: Sulawesi is half-Christian,
but jihadis there think the island should be sanitized for Islam. The idea
is to win a limited war for shariah law in an area where radicals think they
can set up an Islamic government. Scattered "secure areas" for shariah
have existed in other countries, like the Philippines. The Moro Islamic Liberation
Front built base camps there in the early '90s, for example, and within a
few years a network of Muslim villages on Mindanao Island answered to "the
Bangsamoro Islamic government" instead of Manila.
This war has been mentioned by US President
George W. Bush. Lately he's been on the lecture circuit to refresh everyone's
memory about the war on terrorism. "The terrorists' stated objective,"
he has said recently in a handful of cities, "is to drive US and coalition
forces out of Iraq and gain control of that country and then use Iraq as a
base from which to launch attacks against America, overthrow moderate governments
in the Middle East, and establish a totalitarian Islamic empire that reaches
from Spain to Indonesia."
He's right -- that is what the terrorists
want. Whether their wishes are in danger of coming true is another question.
The columnist William Pfaff has made fun of the speech line by calling it,
"a farrago of unattainable Islamist ambitions and al-Qaida's delusions,
cobbled together by administration speech-writers to frighten Americans who
are laggard in their support for Bush's war."
Much of Sulawesi -- like most of Indonesia
-- is peaceful and calm. But there are scattered battlegrounds. Indonesia
is the largest Muslim country in the world: It has a secular constitution,
but (like Iraq) it's new to democracy. I went there in spring 2004 to research
a book and watch the people elect a president. A right-wing dictator, General
Suharto, had ruled the vast chain of tropical islands for more than thirty
years, from 1965 to 1998; but a student movement inspired by a rotten economy
forced him out, and while I was there Indonesians were casting their first
direct votes for president.
I also dropped in on members of Majelis Mujahideen
of Indonesia -- MMI, or the Council of Martyrs -- which is a front group for
Jemaah Islamiyah, the al-Qaida linked group that contributes foot soldiers
in Sulawesi. Abu Bakar Baashir, the famous old radical with a white beard
who keeps moving in and out of jail, founded MMI in 2000. The group's relationship
to Jemaah Islamiyah is like Sinn Fein's to the Irish Republican Army: One
is official, the other not. MMI has a Web site and makes campaign endorsements
-- though they don't always talk to the press. Although Baashir likes to call
both Jemaah Islamiyah and al-Qaida figments of the government's (or America's)
imagination, everyone can agree that MMI is real.
Meeting the fundamentalists
My guides and translators were university
students in Yogyakarta, a lively cultural hub in the middle of Java. When
I asked them to put me in touch with "fundamentalists," I wasn't
sure what to expect, but through Abi and Syihab I got to have a rare conversation
about democracy and shariah law with hard-core (but unarmed) Indonesian jihadis.
The MMI office was a low bare building in
the east of Yogyakarta, on a plain residential street. It had the shabby uninspiring
feel of a tax office. A concrete overhang shaded a green-tiled porch where
a desk stood next to a glass souvenir case full of pulp novels with Muslim-superhero
themes.
A member named Hasyim Abdullah checked us
in. He was thin and short but intense, with a dark beard like a lace curtain,
a black peci or pillbox cap, and a brown callus on his forehead from bowing
during prayer. Abi and Syihab, my translators, mentioned it later: The callus
was a badge of radicalism.
First, there were rules: We had to sign in.
We had to show I.D. I filled out a form declaring my intentions. When that
was over we talked about Islam in a casual way. Hasyim sat behind the desk
and spoke with brow-creased passion. Other Majelis members came to sit around
us. One of them, Rian Firdausi, said we were "just talking," since
the executive director wasn't in. No one else could speak for MMI as an organization.
They could give their own opinions, but not the official word.
Rian wore a white peci, squarish tape-mended
glasses, and a long off-white robe. He wasn't bearded so much as unshaven.
He had a gentle manner and didn't polemicize like Hasyim.
With my form in his hands, Hasyim squinted.
He wasn't sure if he could trust me. He started with a few principles: Muslims
viewed God as the only source of truth, and therefore the only source of law.
Democracies since the French Revolution had turned "majority rule"
into God. Muslims, on the other hand, had a perfect way of ordering society.
God had given them an unimpeachable set of laws, through the Koran and the
hadiths, or acts of Mohammed, which would solve every human problem.
I said no one confused God with majority rule
in the United States. The founders of both America and modern France had seen
a distinction between the law of God and the law of man. Christianity allowed
this distinction.
Hasyim asked for evidence.
"Evidence?" I asked Abi.
"He's asking if you remember any specific
lines from the Bible that allow people to have laws outside Christianity."
In other words, to Hasyim, western systems
were Christian systems. He didn't believe there was separation of church and
state. So I tried to think of a good line from the Bible.
"Well, there's a proverb from Jesus --
'Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, give to God what is God's.' He was talking
to Jews about paying tax to the Romans."
Hasyim had never heard this quotation. He
asked me to repeat it. Then he explained that in Islam, law came only from
God.
Allah and traffic laws
"Allah makes law for every human problem,"
Rian said in careful English. "Why should we make law again?"
"Every problem? Even the small ones?"
I asked.
"Yes, of course," Rian said.
"How about parking and traffic laws?"
At first they were confused. I wasn't trying
to be facetious. But Rian said bitterly, "Can you think of a problem
with traffic-parking that goes against the rule of Allah?"
"So human laws are allowed if they don't
violate Islam?"
"Yes."
Abi explained, "Minor laws can be extrapolated
from larger laws in the Koran."
"Then is democracy an acceptable way
to arrive at smaller laws, as long as they don't contradict the Koran?"
I asked.
"Aha." Hasyim had me here. In his
aggressive, precise and rapid dry voice he spun out another argument, and
Abi translated: "We cannot divide between Islam and democracy, because
Islam is by nature democratic."
"How?"
"One law in the Koran says, 'Males and
females who have done their duties correctly will be given the same reward.'"
"I see. Equality under God."
"Yes." Abi translated Hasyim: "Islam
as a law of living is perfect; it's been blessed by Allah himself. There's
democracy as a doctrine, and Islam as a doctrine. But the true one is Islam."
A doctrine? Abi had used this word more than
once. Hasyim went on: The trouble with America, he argued, was that it had
no single moral standard. There were many standards; this led to confusion.
How did I account for America's social problems under democracy? They were
the result of different standards. In France, Muslim dress had been outlawed
-- was that democratic? In Indonesia or any Muslim nation I was free to worship
as I pleased. In fact, Islam was more tolerant than western democracy. Since
the 14th century there had never been a church, or temple, or synagogue, or
holy house from any foreign tradition destroyed by Muslims in any Islamic
society. Yet there was intolerance of Muslims in Europe and America. How did
I account for these contradictions?
The killing in Sulawesi that had been going on for several years seemed worth
mentioning, but Hasyim's answer had turned into a rant. The idea that no church
or temple or synagogue had ever been destroyed by Muslims in centuries was
such nonsense I had no idea what to say. Hasyim was baiting me. The reason
for violence against other religions in Muslim areas is normally some variation
on self-defense. Islam is under attack -- which is what militants think in
Sulawesi, because so many Christians do missionary work there -- so Muslims
need to take up arms.
I went back to another subject. I asked Hasyim
about the word "doctrine." To me, democracy wasn't a doctrine --
it was a process. Not a perfect one, and people weren't perfect under it.
But a democratic system could evolve.
"But it cannot give answers to the human
problem," he said.
I asked how he accounted for social problems
in theocracies like Iran, Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, where shariah was in force.
"They don't stay close enough to the
Koran and the hadiths," said Rian. "God and his law are perfect,
men are fallible. Also, people who commit violence in the name of Islam do
dishonor to Islam, in the eyes of the world."
